Under the Sun
by rabid behemoth
Summary: The first time Kakashi saw Sakura naked she was covered in blood. [KakaSaku]


**A/N**: For neonanything, who wanted pollyanna angst and porn for her birthday. I'm sorry you only got 60% of one and 30% of the other, but you're contractually obligated to enjoy this fic because it_ really resisted being written jesus christ_

- o -

**Under the Sun**

- o -

The first time Kakashi ever saw Sakura naked she was covered in blood.

In one remote corner of his brain, all he could register was red. Everything was _wrong wrong wrong,_ she was the medic, she was supposed to fix _him_, not be the one bleeding out on the gritty sand, pretty pools of the stuff that made her _her_ gushing out to stain the dunes crimson. Her life was wet and sticky, and the way it splashed brightness into the dull beige surroundings looked almost artistic. Like the hand of god had taken an unseen brush and painted it all over just so, just so Kakashi could have the tortuous privilege of this sight. It wouldn't be one he could ever forget.

Another part of his brain laughed at the irony of her nudity, how after so many years of taking missions together he'd never once caught a glimpse of anything untoward, but of course the one time he did she had both feet in the grave and was handing him the shovel. Not even alive enough to rage at him. Approaching death should have made her small and vulnerable, but in spite of that she was so much bigger than he could've imagined. More grown, dying body filled out in all the right places. He dimly wondered whether the sight of her pert, gore-splattered breasts was erotic or not. Kakashi watched gloved hands slice the tattered remains of her clothes off, furiously scooping the blood back into her gaping flesh and knew he was finally losing his mind.

If Shizune hadn't arrived just then, his story probably would have ended there, on that random, insignificant mound of sand just outside the alliance's base — so, so close to safety and yet too far. It was pure chance that Shizune's team was heading out just as he and Sakura were returning. Later he found out it wasn't such an accident that she stumbled across them in the nick of time — she had mistaken the noises he didn't remember making for the howls of a wounded animal.

Kakashi could only laugh when she told the story like it was a joke long afterward. The naked, bloody, dying Sakura joke. He laughed, but not because it was only funny since everything worked out, like it was for the other seasoned shinobi who brushed elbows with death daily. They had to take their job with a healthy dose of black humor to cope with the terror of it, so they laughed and cajoled and accused him of being a perverted sensei, or a lucky dog, or both. _Jailbait, hahaha_. Even Sakura joined in the teasing. Because she didn't remember. She wasn't really there. He had been so alone, more alone than ever before, under the merciless sun with her warm corpse-to-be.

Kakashi laughed because there was virtually nothing else he could do in the face of what almost was. He hadn't even realized what reality meant to him until it had almost slipped his grasp for the final time.

The war ended, time passed and everything went back to normal, but he never forgot that feeling.

- o -

The second time Kakashi saw Sakura naked was under entirely better circumstances, though the consequences were no less permanent.

The Rokudaime's wedding to the Hyuuga heiress was one of the most epic in Konoha's history. The ceremony itself had to take place in the chuunin exam stadium to accommodate all the guests, but that was nothing compared to the reception. Every shop in Konoha had closed down (except Ichiraku, which was running a bang-up catering job that Teuchi had to plan for three months in advance). The packed streets teemed with red-faced revelers, some in traditional dress, others sporting Western clothes. Most women had shed their heels some time ago.

Kakashi was among those who'd imbibed too much champagne (served him right for trying to go toe to toe with the former Godaime herself), but one could never know just from looking at him; any trace of pink to his cheeks was hidden beneath his mask. His only tell was an imperceptible wobble when he walked.

Well, that and his failure to notice the large sign on the restroom declaring "LADIES."

He pushed the door open to the sound of giggles abruptly halting. Ino stared at him glazed-eyed and slack-jawed, but he didn't actually notice her.

Kakashi had eyes only for the other.

Her body was the sea, and the first thing that registered were legs. Long ones, long as the horizon line where the sky straddles the water. Nicely tanned from a recent mission to Suna. Smooth as glass, all the way up to the inviting softness of thigh emerging from seashell pink boyshorts. The flat plane of an abdomen. The turquoise flash of a mismatched bra, exposed from where she had been struggling to get her elbow through the armhole of a more comfortable dress. When his eye finally met hers, staring back at him unblinkingly from beneath a nest of bright hair, the breath died in Kakashi's lungs.

He didn't move, didn't avert his eyes, didn't stutter incoherent apologies. He just stood there, transfixed, the way one would stare at a catastrophe-in-progress, an oncoming runaway horse, or maybe even the end of the world.

It was Ino's screech that made time flow again.

"Pervert!" she shouted, hurling a shoe at him.

The great copy ninja was so absorbed he failed to duck in time. It hit him square in the temple, pointed stiletto heel leaving a lump that would be a visible reminder of his transgression for days afterward. Thankfully, his sense returned to his head along with the blow, and he somehow tore his gaze from Sakura's face long enough to hightail it out of there.

Kakashi spent the rest of the reception avoiding all flashes of pink (panties or hair?) and inventing boozy explanations for his behavior. It was because she looked so unrecognizable from the skinny twelve year old he'd met a lifetime ago — or was it yesterday? — his brain had hijacked his eyes until the differences could be reconciled. It was because his judgement was impaired from the alcohol, combined with the fact that the last time he'd laid eyes (or anything else, for that matter) on a woman was god-knows-how-long-ago. The best explanation, however, was that he was simply so grateful for the contrast between how she looked now — flushed skin a testament to her vivacity, ribcage rising and falling with breath- and how she looked last time he'd seen her unclothed. That time on the hot sand under the sun when all the blood that made her so rosy now was on the outside, and he was trying to put it back inside where it belonged, a stubborn child struggling to refill the moat of a collapsing sandcastle.

He never told a soul about the incident in the bathroom, but the eyes of the villagers seemed to rest burdensome as chains on his back wherever he went.

- o -

His chance to apologize to Sakura came sooner than expected, but the encounter didn't exactly go as planned.

She was coming from the administration building and he was a receding tide slouching past the academy. The sun was setting, which meant she had probably just finished filing her hospital reports for the day. The dying light transformed her hair into a kind of ethereal halo around her head. Kakashi noticed the vibrancy of it — really _saw_ it — for the first time in years, probably since he met her. Like a glimpse through a white picket fence, he caught a sudden understanding of how much of her he'd been taking for granted.

Her smile, for one. When she looked up and saw him, it was so brilliant Kakashi had to look away.

She sidled up to him and starting talking, something about work and the thing she'd had for lunch and someone's new pet something. Or at least that's what Kakashi thought she was talking about — he couldn't really hear her over the sight of enthusiastic gestures, lightly bouncing breasts and exaggerated facial expressions. Her muffled laughter echoed in his ears like he was hearing it through a glass wall, dimmed down background music. Her medic's uniform was askance on her frame, the collar hanging just low enough on her shoulder to show off a sliver of bra strap. Off-white. Kakashi immediately wondered if her panties didn't match again.

Without warning he was x-raying her with a dark camera lens for an eye. The loose uniform left much to the imagination, but Kakashi's imagination had very accurate source material and a photographic memory to work from. Just the hint of a dip here, the suggestion of a curve there, and all he could see was naked, bare Sakura. 100% pure, not from concentrate. But this time, the third time, she was entirely in his head. Lips, breasts, hips, buttocks, everything. Thighs spread out in front of his nose like peeled fruit, knees hooked around his shoulders as he buried his face in wet —

"I'm sorry," he ground out in the middle of her diatribe, fighting down panic in the face of his own careening thoughts. He tried to think of cats, or cold tea, or nothing, but each image slipped from his grasp like smoke. In the fire at the center of the matter was her face. It eyed him with bemusement.

"For what?"

All the convoluted answers to that question tried to escape Kakashi's mouth at once, choking him. He doubled over and coughed, shoulders shuddering with the violence of it. A small hand patted his back firmly, sending jolts of electricity down his spine to his heels like the nervous shock from a too-hard landing.

"Are you okay?" He could feel green orbs studying him though he abruptly couldn't bear to lay his own eye on her face.

He answered her sandals instead, fit subsiding. "F-fine."

She removed her hand from his back and Kakashi remembered to breathe. "What were you trying to apologize for?"

Everything. "Nothing."

The rustle of fabric meant she'd crossed her arms in front of her chest. There would be a soft line where two swells were pressed together —

"Is this about you walking in on me the other day?"

Yes. "No."

A soft snort. "There's no need to feel so awkward about it. What's a little nudity between friends?" He winced when she laughed. Because she was right, it shouldn't be a big deal. Had it been anyone else he would have forgotten it days ago. But because this was Sakura, vibrant outspoken unsexualizedbutnotreally soft-breasted adultchild pink missile _Sakura_, there was this _fascination_ with the very idea of —

Kakashi forcefully yanked his head from his ass and glanced at a nonexistent watch on his wrist. "Oh, I'm late for an out-of-country appointment, we'll have to continue this conversation another time."

The exasperated cry of "You are so weird, sensei!" followed him around the corner and down the eleven block sprint to his front door, snapping at his heels the whole way. He slammed the door shut behind him and barely managed to make it to the bathroom in time. He lost his lunch all over the floor anyway, unable to look upon his distorted reflection in the toilet bowl.

- o -

Kakashi wanted to pretend nothing had changed between them, that he thought of her no less innocently than as the bright-eyed genin who'd called him 'sensei' with such admiration once-upon-a-time. But on drinking days — and such days were occurring with notably increasing frequency — when he could be brutally honest with himself, he knew it wasn't true. A switch had been flipped, he'd seen sights that couldn't be unseen, learned truths of her too-adult femininity that couldn't be unlearned. He found himself recalling the image of her half-dressed in the bathroom with painful clarity and far too much regularity.

To his eternal relief, they'd stopped taking missions together when she was promoted to head of hospital, the youngest one in village history. But Konoha was not as big a village as one might think, and every time he chanced to run into her he was overcome with unwanted mental images. His greedy eye was drawn to whatever sliver of skin was showing, from the too-low V of her zippered top to the terrible legs emerging from tight shorts. Even a flash of pale wrist or that patch of skin behind an ear was not safe from his lurid gaze. He could never hear what she said anymore, not over the pounding of blood in his ears, his sweating palms and continued coughing fits.

He began avoiding her like she was contagious, ducking around corners and crouching in shops the second he sensed her chakra nearby. His friends worried about him when he started holing up in his apartment and engaging in bizarrely uncharacteristic behaviors like locking his front door. He was successful at avoiding most social interaction for some time, but not even Kakashi could escape his dreams.

He rewrote the wedding incident in his sleep without Ino. Without his paralysis. Without his sense of propriety or sanity. Instead, when he walked in on her, he would see the burning in those wide green eyes, and his hands would act of their own accord. He'd have her pinned against the wall before she knew what hit her, his mouth covering hers before she could object. She would try to speak but he swallowed her words, letting her voice slide down his throat like bitter medicine. He'd rip the thin barrier of her panties aside and take her standing up, warm thighs clinging to his hips, nails biting into his shoulders as he pounded her into the dirty bathroom wall, rattling the stall doors.

She'd squeeze, sucking him into her until his toes curled and his balls clenched and he popped like a dropped bassline, a missed note, a skipped heartbeat, spilling into her. He'd kiss her and kiss her afterwards. To apologize, to beg forgiveness, to keep himself from having to look into her eyes and see the ghost of the little girl she once was in her expression. He always woke up before he saw her face. Woke to sweat-soaked sheets, a straining erection and crushing guilt for company.

- o -

It changed again one ordinary day. He was preoccupied with thoughts of a difficult upcoming solo mission, and apparently she finally figured out to mask her chakra when she neared him.

She caught him from behind, slender arms like steel beams trapping him on either side of his waist, caging him to the bar. The threat of chakra buzzed in the air. He recognized her scent immediately, stomach retreating to his knees, sweat already standing out on his brow under the dim lights of the smoky pub.

"Don't. Move."

Easy enough. He was so frozen with fear he doubted he could ever move again. How strange the rest of his life would look, as seen from the perspective of one whose ass was permanently affixed to a barstool. He would grow old and die here, enduring the stupid bartender and his _looks_. Why can bartenders always tell?

"If I let you go, do you promise to stay put?"

Thought having evaporated out his ears, all Kakashi could do was nod mechanically.

"Good," she said, making to sit down beside him.

His feet were equally automatic when they bolted, carrying him toward the exit faster than the other patrons could wonder if he was having a lover's spat or just trying to skip his bill. But she wasn't one of Konoha's finest for nothing. She caught him round the elbow easily, using chakra to wrench him from the door and drag him down the short hall to the right instead. The only coherent thought in Kakashi's head was _dear god, not the fucking bathroom again._

The door to the ladies' room slammed shut behind them, his back hitting the opposite wall with a painful crunch. Green eyes blazed at him from a face flushed with anger, and Kakashi was horrified to see the sheen of moisture in them. He looked away so fast he pulled a muscle in his neck.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

Fat chance he was answering that question. When his silence persisted, she lunged forward and grabbed his chin, forcing his face toward hers.

"Look at me, damn it!" she growled, and he could only comply helplessly. Her face was much too close, his eye riveted to her mouth — that sinful mouth. Her scent assaulted his nostrils, jamming his brain and clouding his head. Through the fuzziness Kakashi saw flashes of his dream-memories play before his eyes like a movie, superimposed over her face. He caught glimpses of sweaty thighs and bare shoulders, needy moans, felt himself exploring her secret places all over again —

She felt his frame begin to shake beneath her hands and released him immediately, stepping back in shock. The anger bled out of her white face, eyes wide.

"What's wrong with you?"

Silence.

"Why won't you talk to me?"

He tore his eye from her, unable to bear her expression. He studied the graffiti on the wall behind her. 'Fuck you.' How apt.

"I don't understand. Please," she tried, hands twisting into her hair. "Please, sen —"

_"Don't,_" he snapped, the first thing he'd said to her in months. He wanted to rip that filthy word from her mouth, drown it, bury it, set it on fire. Erase it from her vocabulary so she could never use it against him again.

"Don't call me that."

Her unspoken question weighed down on him like judgement, but this was one thing he could never explain to anyone, least of all to her. When the soft patter of tears against grimy tile met his ears, whatever was left of his heart shattered into a thousand pieces.

"I thought — I thought we were close," she began. "You've always been so important to me, Kakashi, I can't understand why you stopped caring —"

"Of course I didn't," he croaked out, cutting her off. He couldn't let her think that. Anything but that.

"At least be honest about it," she spat. "I'm not an idiot. I see how you avoid me. You can't even stand to look at me right now."

Kakashi closed his eyes but said nothing.

"Is it something I did? Is it my fault?" Her voice cracked, hands covering her face, talking more to herself than to him at this point.

Kakashi's willpower was a rubber band stretched to the breaking point.

"You can't," he growled, making her start. "You don't get to blame yourself. No. You're a good girl, Sakura, and you always have been. It's me. I'm sick."

Her gaze snapped up, though her guarded expression indicated she was unsure whether to believe him. "If you're sick, why haven't you come to to me? Or if you have a problem with me, why not Tsunade-shishou —"

"I'm not ill," he said curtly, hating himself for revealing even this much. "I'm _sick_."

Sakura just stood there and blinked at him for a good minute. When it became apparent he wasn't going to elaborate, she threw up her hands in frustration, fresh tears chasing each other down her cheeks. Kakashi stretched agonizingly thinner with each one.

"Why do you have to be so damned cryptic? Why can't you just say what you mean?"

It had to be this way. If she hated him, so be it. It was better for her to hate him than suffer the truth. But her every word was _pulling_ on him.

"Do you have any idea what you're doing to me? How much you're hurting me?"

Not as much as it'd hurt to know what kind of monster he really was, how twisted, or if god forbid he ever gave into his impulses —

"You can tell me anything, I swear!" she continued, oblivious to the way his heart was twisting in his chest.

_Shut up shut up shut up_. The rubber band was so thin and tight with tension —

"Just don't shut me out. Please, not you. It's too lonely, I can't stand it."

He grit his teeth.

"_Please_, sen —"

**Snap**.

Before he knew what his own body was up to, he'd stepped forward and stole the word from her mouth with his own. She was frozen stiff with shock, but he pressed on, unable to control it any longer, needing to say what couldn't possibly be said. He cradled her face in his palms, vaguely manic thumbs stroking her damp cheeks. His lips touched her soft ones gently once, and again, and again, pressing, tasting, talking — he didn't even know when he'd pulled his mask down. He kissed her like it wasn't completely wrong, like they'd never been teacher and student, like she was any other woman.

But she wasn't just any woman. She was _Sakura_, and that made it so much worse. He couldn't sort out his convoluted feelings — his sense of duty as her mentor, his affection for her as a friend, the dangerously soft thoughts of her smile, her laugh, the physical desire for her body — it all meshed together into one terrible jumble of unnamed attraction, and Kakashi was powerless in the face of its intensity. His blood thrummed with debilitating need and his eyes squeezed shut against the truth and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her with everything he was, everything he should never be —

When tentative lips parted to accept his tongue, Kakashi woke up.

He jerked himself away from her warmth violently. Instead of anger, accusation or disgust, all he saw in her dazed, half-lidded eyes was confusion. Confusion, and a glimmer of something impossible. She blinked, swollen lips parting to say something.

Kakashi ran for both their lives.

- o -

It was over. He was finished.

Hatake Kakashi threw his things haphazardly into a pile, several other sealed scrolls laying around nearby. He would leave the furniture; there was no point lugging that wherever he was going. His favorite armchair would hardly be of use to him should he end up in the wilderness somewhere.

He laughed while he packed, the sound coming out choked and high-strung, like his grip on reality. Already tenuous at best, now liable to snap any moment. Every second he stayed here longer he was a danger to himself and others.

One other in particular.

She hadn't even pushed him away. She hadn't even said no. She would have _complied_. She cared for him so much, too much, she would have given him whatever he wanted if only to hold onto her sensei, disgusting excuse for a human being he was. And in the blackest bottom of his heart, Kakashi knew he was just selfish enough to take it.

It would be so easy. He could show up at her door, and she would let him in. Invite him in of her own free will. There wouldn't even be a need for talking or explanations. Sakura was a clever idiot, she would figure out the deal the second he claimed her mouth again, the moment his hand fumbled for her other lips, the ones between her legs —

Kakashi dropped that line of thought like a hot coal, fighting down the throbbing between his own thighs. If he had to go anyway, which he absolutely did, the notion of having her just once, as a kind of twisted consolation prize was maddeningly tempting. He could give in just the one time, then disappear forever.

But that was impossible. If he caved once, he knew the need would never stop. He could never leave her alone again.

More than that though, more than anything else, he could never forgive himself for hurting her. Hell, he could never forgive himself for even thinking of it.

But god, he would miss her when he was gone.

Kakashi grabbed his pack and scrolls and flew out of his apartment for the last time before he could change his mind.

- o -

The last time was the first time.

It was a testament to exactly how well she knew him that she met him just two miles outside the gates, in the same clearing she and Naruto defeated the second bell test a short lifetime ago. He should have seen her coming but his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of where he would go and how he would make an honest living and how he would _not_ turn around and march to her apartment to have sex with a teenage former student and how he would _not_ think of her legs nor her hips nor how good she'd look spread out on soft sheets beneath him —

The blow to the back of his head was just enough to make him black out for a second but not enough to make him collapse. His palm shot out to steady himself against the nearest tree. When his vision finally found its focus again he noted the expression on her face and took an unconscious step back.

"You're crazy," she announced, eyeing the travelling pack strapped to his back like it was a dismembered limb he had taken to carrying around.

"You always were my brightest student," he returned automatically, though the situation could not possibly have been less funny.

Small fingers curled into fists at her sides. "I won't allow it."

He could tell from her set jaw how deadly serious she was, which was a legitimate problem. She wasn't a little girl anymore. He'd have to seriously hurt her to get past, assuming he could manage it at all. The thought made him physically nauseous but not as sick as the alternative. He pushed his forehead protector up and prayed to gods he didn't really believe in for the strength to do it.

It was even worse than he feared. She was too wise to the Sharingan, to all his usual tricks, able to read his moves almost before he thought of them. But he'd been her teacher and her teammate, had helped raise her as a fighter and knew all her techniques just as well.

By the time it ended they'd completely leveled the surrounding forest, rearranged the geography into that of some foreign planet, a whole section of forest to the east charred black. They'd broken each others' bones and ruptured organs and traded fist-sized bruises, but the damage wasn't immediately life threatening for either despite some internal bleeding.

Kakashi's years of experience made the difference, in the end. Her unconscious body lay face-down in the dirt, bloody limbs sprawled crazily around her. He was hit with a wave of self-loathing for the way his eye still lingered on the place where her skirt had ripped nearly up to her hip. He wanted to adjust her position to be easier on her injuries but he didn't dare touch her. Didn't trust himself within fifty miles of her.

His mistake was in not leaving immediately, then and there. He stared, and just couldn't wrap his mind around how this was the last time in his miserable life he'd ever see this beautiful girl. The more he thought about it the less his feet could move and roots sprung from his eyes and grew into her.

He lingered only two seconds too long. Suddenly her shape twitched and Kakashi cursed every deity to hell and back in every language he knew because his feet_ weren't fucking moving._ He willed and strained and prayed but they remained still as the air in his lungs. Bleary green blinked up at him and Kakashi drowned in the color.

"Wait," she said, coughing and thick-voiced. "Take me with you."

Amazement slammed into him with enough force to knock the breath from his lungs, and Kakashi had to take a step back to keep from falling. It was impossible that anyone, that she, could care for him so much. Sakura, who loved her village more than anything, who would have given her life for it a million times over, who on too many occasions nearly did. Sakura, who could never abandon Naruto, who was her brother, nor Sasuke, who she'd finally dragged back after so many years of searching, nor Tsunade, who was like a second mother to her. Nor her actual mother. Her family. Ino. The rookie nine. The hospital. Her career. Sakura was asking to give up all of that forever so she could go off philandering with the so-called teacher powerless to stop his own filthy desire for her?

Kakashi's arms hung boneless at his sides and he tipped his head back to laugh at the heavens though everything inside himself hurt.

"Now who's crazy," he asked no one in particular.

Sakura had somehow climbed to her feet and was already glowing softly with healing chakra. She pinned him with the most serious expression he'd ever seen on her face before.

"The last time I said those words to someone I loved I meant every one of them with my whole being. This time I mean them even more. This time, I'm not powerless and you'll never get rid of me. I'll hunt to the ends of the earth for you, and I won't give up."

The world tilted on its axis and the sky was where the ground should be and he stuck out a hand to catch himself but then his ass was in the mud. He blinked up at her once he reoriented himself, watching as she strode forward purposefully, injuries already much more healed than his own. He realized he had won the battle but lost the war, he truly wasn't going anywhere without her permission. Not for long. Not if she chose this. His body was so numb it felt like it belonged to someone else and he was sure his expression was utterly blank. There were so many things he needed to say about this impossibly fucked up situation, about her, about himself, but when he opened his mouth the only word that came out was, "Why?"

She came to a halt in front of him, put her hands on her knees and bent forward, bringing her face closer to his. Her expression was suddenly gentle but there was a crease in her brow like he'd asked a worryingly obvious question.

"Because I love you, you idiot."

Kakashi made a noise in the back of his throat that was not recognizably human. Sakura chuckled and continued to lean forward until her forehead bumped against his headband lightly. Kakashi couldn't so much as blink, let alone move or offer a verbal response. His brain was a puddle of oatmeal, incapable of shuffling words into coherent thought. Especially those particular words, in that order, from her.

He didn't think it possible for anything to shock him more than he already was, until she wiped a smear of blood from her lips and smiled the most contented smile he'd ever seen.

"And the good news is, apparently you love me too."

Kakashi swayed dangerously but she caught his elbow before he could either topple over or pass out. She kept her hand there, working on his injuries through the contact.

"You never would have tried to run away from me so much if it wasn't true," she went on, directing her chakra to his broken ribs next. "I mean you actually _fought_ me. Seriously. I can't believe it took me so long to see it. I guess you were just the last person I ever expected to return my feelings."

Kakashi flushed alternately hot and cold, like his body couldn't make up its mind how to feel. For a terrifying moment he thought he would be sick all over her, but the nausea subsided as suddenly as it had come. The world stopped spinning long enough for him to gargle out something resembling words.

"But Sakura, I don't — I'm not — "

"Oh yes you are," she interrupted, nodding sagely. "I've known you almost my whole life. If anyone can tell, it's me. You just have some of the most bizarre ways of coping with unexpected feelings I've ever seen, but I guess that's only to be expected. I mean this is _you_ we're talking about, sensei."

The word, the loathsome word, hit him in the solar plexus, snapping him out of the fog of his mind.

"No," he said more concretely, unsure where a coward like himself drew such courage from for this. "No, you don't understand. I —" He nearly gagged on the admission, but forced himself to continue. "I — I _want_ you. I don't —"

"Yes, you _do_," Sakura insisted, still smiling like the universe finally made sense. "For someone like you, Kakashi, they're the same thing. You couldn't possibly want me unless you love me."

Kakashi's expression slid right off his face. His eyes unfocused when his thoughts retreated inward. Something big was processing, slowly at first, but with rapidly increasing speed, like the dim light of a train growing brighter as it surged forward through a dark tunnel. New information rained down like a shower of missing puzzle pieces, and the past broke up and rearranged itself in his mind into a completely different picture. Impossible as it was, suddenly he could almost _see_ it the way she was saying —

He doubled over abruptly in a coughing fit, shoulders heaving. Sakura knelt and rubbed his back in circles.

"It's okay now, sensei. Everything's going to be okay now."

When he looked up there were tears running down her cheeks but she was still grinning so brightly it hurt his eyes.

"But how can anything be okay, how can any of that be okay, when you're someone who calls me 'sensei'?" he asked brokenly.

Her radiance dimmed just a bit, tears still falling unnoticed. "What I call you isn't important. Never was. What matters is who you are to me. And you've been so much more than a sensei for so, so long now."

Kakashi went very quiet. He wasn't sure how much time had passed before he finally spoke again. "Then why are you crying?"

"Because no one else will understand that but us."

Ah. Something almost like relief filled Kakashi at that, or rather the sense that he'd finally returned to the world as he knew it, where his wildest and most impossible fantasies didn't spontaneously come true without costs. "So you mean —"

"Yeah," she said, wiping her face with her hands and smearing dirt across her cheek, but doing her best to keep smiling for him. "Yeah, we'll have to go."

The words hung like weights and Kakashi merely breathed, feeling oddly slow like he was moving underwater. "But what about —"

She kissed him then, and for a brief moment his mind blanked, forgetting everything except the feeling of coaxing lips against his and the slight tang of salt on his tongue, and then she pulled back and rested her forehead against his. Their breaths mingled quietly in the space between and nothing had ever felt so natural in Kakashi's thirty-five years of existence.

"It's okay," she repeated, with even more conviction this time. "We'll make it okay, somehow. I can't imagine how hard it will be, how much it will hurt to — to leave —" her voice cracked but she continued without pause. "But we'll have each other, so I know somehow we'll make it all okay."

She stood then, and Kakashi watched from the ground as her body uncurled and stretched to unreachable heights. She eclipsed the sun and a halo of light shone from behind her as she held out a hand to him.

"Come with me."

She was so beautiful in that moment that he didn't know what to say. He wasn't aware of the tears spilling over to dampen his mask, or even of the pull and flex of his muscles as his arm extended of its own accord. His palm found home against hers and suddenly he knew her words were true like he knew his own name. Somehow, everything would be alright.

They left Konoha for good then, without stopping for any of Sakura's things or to say any impossible goodbyes. They simply turned and started walking, vanishing into the forest side by side, then through the grassland, and the mountains and deserts and oceans, the wide oceans that flowed like her and him all mixed up together, through countless nights and days and all the beautiful and ugly and secret places of the world.

They walked under the sun together, and never let go of the other's hand again.

- fin -


End file.
